According to Jason Kincaid at TechCrunch, YouTube just announced that they will be expanding closed captioning support for all videos on YouTube and rolling out an auto-captioning feature on videos featuring the English language.

Woah.

The implications of this move are extremely interesting. Think about the possibilities, and what this does for Google, online content, search, and extending your online global audience.

Google will launch a service that automatically adds English subtitles to a video, if English is the language spoken in the sound track. That alone is impressive. Speech to text recognition software has been around for a long time, but for Google to have something in their pocket that they feel is good enough to add to public user videos means that they have something highly versatile. Of course, they say it will need input and scrutiny from the video owner, but that’s just a little way of asking for help in making sure they index your content correctly.

Online content wins, because previously, there was no easy and automated way for spoken words to be found in online search unless there was a video transcription. Now Google is going to attempt to do it automatically. Even if they only get it 50% correct, there’s a tremendous opportunity for them to have a handle on a significant amount of content that their competitors do not. This increases the public’s ability to find relevant information, and it also increases Google’s ability to sell contextual advertising.

Finally, when you pair what Google is already doing with offering live website text translation into different languages with auto-captioning, you have the opportunity to instantly expand one little English language video into a globally understandable piece of video content. Without doing anything more, people across the globe can find your video content via search.

Again. Woah.

Keep watching this topic. If it works, this could stir up the competitive search landscape if Bing isn’t close to doing the same thing. Another notch in organizing the world’s information indeed, Google.

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